Stupid gaming trends

Now that more and more people are gaming, a lot of gaming trends become more noticeable and some of them are really stupid.

One of the oldest stupid gaming trends : Calling the PS1 a PSX. This would be fine, but there already is a Sony console released only in Japan that's called the PSX. This often creates confusion.

A few years ago, the PC master race and console peasant thing started. This actually makes sense, because PC's are more powerful and more useful than consoles. The problem here, are the fanboys.

What do you think is the most stupid gaming trend ?

 

DLC done wrong. Need I say more?

EDIT: Oh and releasing games before they are finished.

 

Oh god, Super Smash Bros. 4 is both of these in a nutshell. Their character DLC is borderline ridiculously expensive ($6 for Ryu, blow me Nintendo), and I can't justify $2 per N64 stage, especially when I can already have those exact stages in Brawl/Project M for free. Also, updates seem to often introduce horrific glitches and exploits. Pac-Man in particular has proven to be a horribly programmed character, as he's had "skills" introduced wherein he can phase opponents through the stage. Oh, and they only released Tourney mode now, nearly a year after SSB3DS came out, only to be a buggy shit-sty.

As for my own annoying trends, I have to go with digital bullshit. It's hard to explain well, but one example is how some games are made impossible to find after some time has passed due to licensing issues (e.g. the removal of Marvel vs Capcom games from digital marketplaces).

 

Never even heard of project m before. Interesting idea.

 

Except you have this backwards. The stupid thing was Sony's CE division releasing a product called "PSX" when the name was already universally understood to mean "PlayStation". If you install SDevTC (the official Sony toolchain) you can see that the C compiler is called "ccpsx", the assembler is called "aspsx", all the platform tools are in a directory called "psx" - and even the boot ROM thinks the console is a "PSX", because the default boot filename is "PSX.EXE".

Basically, the use of "PSX" to mean "PlayStation" substantially predates the introduction of the DESR series DVRs.

 

There's not really any confusion when it comes to PSX/PS1: practically every time the term PSX is used, it means the original Playstation, and from context it's usually obvious if they're talking about the other PSX.

The worst gaming trend, at least in recent memory, was "street racing" games. Need For Speed turned overnight into Fast and the Furious crap with ugly white trash "tuner" cars and C-list nu-metal blaring in the background, and about a trillion other devs followed suit.

 

F-king tiny text on higher resolutions. I thought I was supposed to stand away 3X the size of the screen. How can I read this sentence from 3 feet away?

Anybody heard of scaling?

 

I would say:

Quick Time Events are annoying.

Unskippable cutscenes should NEVER exist. Nor should the x amount of logo screens/logo videos/legal messages/advertisments/etc that you have to sit through before the game gets to it's main menu.

Having to press the same button repeatedly several times over a second or so to perform an action (such as to force open a window or to live a heavy option, on the other hand, feels OK in a console game (though I could live without it), but on the PC it seems very out of place.



... but these aren't new trends, they've existed for twenty years at least. So I will say:


The lack of bots (computer controlled opponents) in multiplayer games.

The lack of split screen in multiplayer games (it was never common in PC games, but it used to be very common in console games).

The way first person shooter maps are now much more linear and require almost no exploration. And to make the game even easier, many og them have onscreen arrows or similar, to show you how to get to the exit, or to the next objective.

The way first person shooters now insist on telling you to "Press X to open" when you are at a door, or "Press A to use" when you are at a switch, etc, thereby removing the need to think for yourself. They also often now highlight the objectives to save you looking and questioning the environment, instead they make the objectives shiny to catch your attention.

The weapon carrying limit in first person shooters - it's much more fun to be able to carry every weapon that you find.



There's more, but I'd be here all day.

 

You made a good last point. Wolfenstein the New order reminded me how good those game mechanics were.
I guess, that it's an evolution. 10 years ago, most games had limited health, but unlimited weapons.
Now most games have regenerating health, but a weapon limit.
For some games it works, but for others it doesn't.

 

Any time I ever hear anybody refer to Wolfenstein: The New Order it's always positive. Makes me pretty happy. I had been waiting for Wolfenstein to become relevant again.

While I don't absolutely hate it, I'm not the biggest fan of HD remasters and remakes. For a few games it's nice, but for the games we'd really like to see it for (games made prior to XBOX/PS2/GC/DC) we never see it because, "it would take too much time," or, "it would cost too much." It seems to be turning into a slap-dash quick way to put in minimal work for a decent payout and generate hype for an upcoming sequel. Bluepoint's ports have been solid, but for every one of those it seems we get a mess like the HD Silent Hill Collection.

 

People get offended when you tell them that the PSX is a completely different console, then after they google come back and say "nah it's just a PS2, so its a PS2".....

One thing I don't like (kind of a gaming trend), is the whole "rare" and "vintage or retro" trend on ebay, where by simply having that in the title adds $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Yes and no, unskippable cut scenes are ok if you only have to watch them once (although it is annoying if you make a new game). All those messages are there for a reason, someone had to pay for the game and someone has to make sure no one looses money either.

I wouldn't have a problem with DLC if you could download it and easily burn it, like the media copies of certain DLC's.

There should be a service built into Xbox.com ect where you can download the ISO of a DLc you paid for and burn it to a CD (great for crappy internets), if I can do this with a console OS why not something I paid for?!

 

Or you can just accept that the Pac Attack is the superior game form. #PacMan4Life

Of course, to make it more confusing, there IS a PSOne, the small redesign. So now I see people refer to the big original Playstation as the PSX, then the small one as the PSOne.

As for current trends, I think my least favorite has to be splitting up a game for pre-order DLC. I'm not going to pay for a game before I have any reviews of it. With movie DVDs it's different, because I already know how good the movie is, and usually a lead single off a new CD is dropped before the album does, so I at least know how good some part of it will be.

 

This and this.

Also the absolute dumbing down of games that adds to the forced tutorials:



Aaaaaand, the cover and heal. Wtf, where are the good'ol health crates..

 

This isn't new exactly - I think it's something that started in the early 2000s: one thing that annoys me in games is when they include FMV cutscenes that are obviously just pre-rendered video of the game engine. I don't understand the need for this. If you're going to use the game engine, why not run it in realtime? Even if there is some technical reason for it, it just seems lazy and it unnecessarily breaks up the flow of the game due to the fact that it's usually really obvious. I think graphics in games now are good enough that there shouldn't be anything pre-rendered. Of course you can render stuff more realistically if it's not in realtime, but there's very little that's fundamentally impossible to do in realtime now (whereas this wasn't the case in the recent past). FMV that uses the game engine is just stupid, though; it usually looks worse than the game itself due to the fact that it's usually lower resolution and lower framerate if you're running it on a new machine. I have no idea why developers do that.

 

I think that there usually is a good reason for the in game engine prerendered videos.
They can pull of different kind of animations or different view points more easily.
The cutscenes are usually prerendered when there is a scene that would take a lot more power to process and would make the fps go down.
The way it was done in God of War 3 was perfect. Most of the time the cutscenes were real time, but when they were prerendered, you couldn't even notice.

 

Its a small thing, but I hate it when characters use the word "Maybe"

"Maybe we can put a bomb there and blow up that rock" ...

It would be cool if the "Maybe" not always work.